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This is a lengthy article. But it’s comprehensive and thorough. If you have noticed a marked drop in Google traffic in the last month, I strongly suggest reviewing this article.

The Jagger Update was introduced for three main reasons. The first was to deal with manipulative link-network schemes, sites generated with scraped content and other forms of SE-Spam. The second was to allow and account for the inclusion a greater number of spiderable documents and file types. The third was to allow and account for new methods of site acquisition beyond the use of the spider Googlebot.

Google?s Jagger Update Completing Cycles

I want you to take a look at this post from Matt Cutts, Google Engineer:
Matt Cutts: - SEO Mistakes: Nearly hidden text
He’s not saying anything overly profound with the explicit words he uses. He says that you shouldn’t try to hide text and trick the search engines by making spam text a slightly different color than the background.

What is more profound here is that he is calling out this tactic. He can monitor this. He is saying that what you think might possibly be sliding by the engines, he is catching.

In previous posts, he has shown that Google also can detect spam that is being covered up by CSS.

On top of this, the post-Jagger update at Google has filtered sites that have suspicious linking patterns.

It all comes down to this: be legitimate. You are going to be better off being as natural as possible.

At this point, I suggest rethinking any optimization that artificially increases content or links. If you can’t do it legitimately, I don’t recommend doing it.

I can see the thread now over at WebMasterWord, “SEO Is Dead.” It’s not. If anything it’s more advanced than ever. Legitimacy is much more expensive for a corporate site than faux inflation.

This is an interesting report. Word of mouth advertising is the second most used marketing tactic marketing execs plan to use in the next six months.
Marketing Techniques Marketing Execs Plan to Use

…about 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day

an increase of about 55% from June 2004.

Search is blurring the line of where things start and end. You very likely have room to grow in your search marketing efforts. You owe it to yourself to ask what more you could be doing.
Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Search engine use

Greg Boser does some really interesting research on the cause and effect of the Jagger Update at Google. He makes a really strong case for being leary of any large scale links building. I recommend you give this a read…
WebGuerrilla - aka Greg Boser - The Truth About Reciprocal Link Networks

The Google Sitemap tool has a security flaw in it that allows anyone to see Google Sitemap stats on some sites. The reason is because certain sites don’t handle 404 page errors correctly. They will create a page no matter what address you put in. Google Sitemaps asks you to put a certain page on your server to verify that you own the site. Then they show you the stats. Well, if a server is set up so any page appears to be on the server, anyone can pretend they put that test page on the server and voila!, they can see your Google sitemap stats.

All that said, here are the most searched terms for the The White House…
Failure Most Popular Term Sending Traffic From Google To US White House Site

This is a very rare glimpse.

This article explains in great detail what they are and how to use them. RSS has actually changed my life. I strongly encourage you to check this out.
HOW TO: Getting Started with RSS at PaulStamatiou.com

Matt does a good write up on the benefits and features of the new FREE “Google Analytics”, aka Urchin. This is a tagging tool so you don’t need log files. If you have over 5 million page views you have to sign up for an Adwords account. But there are no requirements as to what you have to spend with that account.

This is tremendous news for web site owners. For the last couple years I have been saying it is a buyers market for analytics. Now it’s a total buyers market being that the bar is now “Free”.

If you don’t have any stats or poor stats, get over there and sign up for this. Stats are the best part of the web for web site owners.

Matt Cutts: Google Analytics

Here’s a new, free rank checker. It has just recently come out. It looks pretty promising and interesting. If you need a tool to see where you are coming up on the engines, this might be something for you to check out:
Checkrankings Free online keyword ranking tool

The third and supposed final update of Google Jagger is here. You might check your site and see if the update had any difference for you. Personally, I’m basing the changes on total number of visits from Google before and after Jagger.
Matt Cutts: Jagger3 update